EDITORS' CORNER
Policy ensures ‘courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default’
Beginning this summer, University of California Berkeley School of Law students will be banned from using artificial intelligence to complete coursework or exams.
Under the newly adopted policy, students cannot “conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work” using AI.
It also explicitly forbids students from asking AI to correct grammar mistakes or translate a paper into English.
Students are permitted to use AI for “research on papers ONLY for the limited purpose of identifying sources, such as cases, statutes, or secondary sources,” the policy states.
However, professors are permitted to make exceptions to this rule as long as they “do so in writing and with appropriate notice and require students to disclose any authorized AI use,” it states.
The policy notes that its goal is to ensure the best possible education for future lawyers.
“Future lawyers may need to use artificial intelligence (‘AI’) fluently. But the current state of the technology requires that AI use be coupled with the cognitive skills necessary to strategically deploy the technology, to critically assess its work product, and to uphold ethical obligations to clients and to the legal system,” the policy states.
It aims to ensure that “courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default.”
Berkeley law Professor Chris Hoofnagle proposed the new rule after many of his students submitted suspicious legal reasoning, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
“If you don’t have your own analytical judgment, AI will do it for you, and then it’s no longer your judgment,” Hoofnagle said.
Another law professor at the school, Jonathan Glater, told the Chronicle that the policy still allows him to demonstrate proper AI use to students.
“There are ways to use the technology that can up a lawyer’s game, and if I am teaching a more advanced class that aims to prepare them to use this tool in practice, it would be weird to prohibit its use,” Glater said.
He added that the new policy “makes a lot of sense … in an introductory class that is helping students learn basic and essential concepts” for studying and learning law.
Faculty at UC Berkeley aren’t the only ones concerned about students relying on AI.
A recent American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University study found that 95 percent of faculty are concerned that students will become dependent on generative AI tools like ChatGPT, The College Fix previously reported.
“Large majorities warn that these tools will lead to student overreliance on AI, weaken their critical thinking, shorten their attention spans, and erode academic integrity and the value of college diplomas – concerns they say strike at the heart of higher education’s mission,” a summary of the report states.
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